Adobe PhotoShop on the Power Macintosh

Of all of the application software for the Macintosh, perhaps the biggest performance hog of all is Adobe Photoshop.  

Well guess what? Adobe has release a free plug in to get started with the PowerMacintosh. 

From Adobe’s read me enclosed with the Plug in:

Adobe Photoshop 2.5 was engineered to ensure maximum productivity with future acceleration technology. To this end, the user-interface code was isolated from the image-processing "engine" code that performs pixel manipulations. The PowerPC Accelerator plug-in replaces the entire Photoshop image-processing engine with a native engine. Using this plug-in, Photoshop users with Power Macintosh computers should realize speed gains of 1.5 - 4 times over a Quadra computer (for in-memory images).

This plug-in speeds all built-in Photoshop functions on the Power Macintosh, such as effects, resizing, rotating, compositing, feathering, color conversion, and all built-in filters including the Blur, Blur More, Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Add Noise, Despeckle, Median, Sharpen, Sharpen More, Sharpen Edges, Unsharp Mask, Emboss, Facet, Find Edges, Fragment, Mosaic, Trace Contour, Custom, High Pass, Maximum and Minimum filters. 

The accelerator does not, however, accelerate plug-in filters, such as the Color Halftone, Crystallize, Wind, Wave, Sphereize, Extrude, Twirl, Tiles, and Pointillize filters. Similarly, the PowerPC Accelerator does not affect third-party plug-ins, such as Aldus Gallery Effects and Kai's Power Tools. Note that the Lens Flare filter currently does not work on the Power Macintosh. Adobe Systems will post an update to this filter when it is available.

Essentially what is does is take all of the built in filters and process them in Native mode on the PowerMacintosh. When I tested it on a PowerMacintosh 7100 vs. a Quadra 840av the Gaussian Blur function was about 2 times faster. I surmise that since the PowerMacintosh 8100 is about 150% faster than the 7100 there would be a comparable gain there too!